I may be wasting my energy writing this column, since by the time it sees print, you could have been wiped out by a missile attack from Iran or North Korea.
That was the report last week from a congressionally appointed commission, which an editorial in The Wall Street Journal interpreted to mean that “we may not know about an enemy missile armed with a chemical or biological warhead until it is already descending on city hall.” So both you and I really should be working on our bomb shelters right now.
But maybe things aren’t so grim. The report does point out some new and worrisome dangers, but the ones that are new aren’t especially worrisome and the ones that are worrisome aren’t new. And the remedy demanded by the alarmists would solve neither.
The commission, chaired by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, says some of our nastier enemies in the world won’t need as much time as we had hoped to develop long-range ballistic missiles capable of spoiling a perfectly nice day in Los Angeles or New York. Instead of having 10 to 15 years before we have to worry about that scenario, “the U.S. might have little or no warning before operational deployment.”
Unlike the United States and the Soviet Union back in the Cold War, we are told, these countries are not too concerned about trivia like accuracy and reliability, so they can move faster. Not only that, but they may get outside help, and they may be able to keep their progress secret until it’s too late.
The commission members, who had access to all sorts of classified information that may not be divulged, take the position that if the rest of us knew what they know, we’d agree. Oh? CIA Director George Tennet and other high-level intelligence officials have seen the same material and reached exactly the opposite conclusion. The day the report came out, they publicly reaffirmed their confidence that no troublemaker could acquire long-range missiles before 2010, with the possible exception of North Korea, and that we would see it coming well in advance.
It’s hard to imagine how a rogue state could build, test and launch one of these missiles without attracting the attention of a watchful United States. Just making one is a hugely complex undertaking that few if any Third World nations are likely to master soon. But if someone does, it would be useless without a flight test, and no country could dream of firing a ballistic missile high into the atmosphere on a trajectory thousands of miles long without being detected.
To then mount a surprise attack, says physicist and nuclear engineer Theodore Postol of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Pentagon science adviser during the Reagan administration, the rogue state would have to “hide a 100-foot-long vehicle that takes hours or days to erect and fuel at an industrial site with a launch stand that takes months to build.” As Raymond Chandler would put it, the enterprise would be as conspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake. And it would be vulnerable to a pre-emptive U.S. air raid that would turn a multibillion dollar project into a very expensive hole in the ground.
The commission worries that someone might overcome all these obstacles by simply launching a short-range missile from a ship near our shores. No one thought to ask: Who needs a missile? Our enemies could deliver a large bomb on a small remote-controlled airplane or a boat cruising into a big-city harbor. Or they could rent a Ryder truck. Any of these means are far simpler than acquiring an ICBM. And unlike missiles, they are available right now.
But the doomsayers have little interest in such mundane perils, because these can’t be used to justify a national missile defense system–a conservative infatuation ever since Ronald Reagan envisioned an impenetrable shield against nuclear attack. The problem is that the U.S. program shows no sign of realizing his extravagant ambition.
So far, it has been marked by failure and delay. As a Pentagon panel reported in February, it has yet to meet the most basic requirement–showing it can actually hit a missile in flight under ideal conditions. Achieving even that would mean little, since in the real world, the enemy could eviscerate the defense with the simplest of counter-measures.
Foreign ballistic missiles may someday be a genuine threat. But expecting a defensive system to save us is like betting on a shutout in an NBA final. Regardless of when and where this new threat arises, we’ll have to cope with it the same way we have coped with the old nuclear threat–by maintaining the capacity to utterly destroy any country that attacks us.
Old-fashioned nuclear deterrence lacks the science-fiction glamour of a Star Wars missile defense. But unlike missile defense, it has worked in the past and promises to work in the future.
